The Role of Broadband in Coping with a Pandemic

Good evening Ithaca time, and welcome to the first of CIPA's COVID-19 policy discussions. My name is John Foote and I am a lecturer and Infrastructure Policy in the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. I hope you're all safe and healthy in coping with the current situation. As we are all experiencing, this pandemic has far-reaching impacts on every aspect of society. To explore the many challenges, we face in the midst, and hopefully the aftermath of COVID-19, CIPA is hosting a series of policy discussions. These are meant to provide context for further discussions that we as policy and public affairs practitioners will be having over the next months and years.

This evening’s topic is broadband accessibility. As lockdowns occur around the world the importance of people being able to utilize the internet for education, health, commercial, and social purposes, has become critical. Unfortunately, the pandemic has exposed serious deficiencies and vulnerabilities in our broadband infrastructure. To talk about how we got here and what we need to do to address this problem, I am very pleased to welcome John Windhausen and Alicia Johnson from the Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband Coalition. This coalition is a nonprofit advocacy organization working to close the digital divide by promoting a high-quality broadband in all of our communities.

John founded the coalition in 2009 with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And before becoming the executive director, he led the Association for Local Telecommunication Services and spent nine years on Capitol Hill as a staff attorney at the FCC, as well as, Senior Counsel to the US Senate Commerce Committee. Alicia Johnson heads up communications for the coalition.

Before we start here are the rules of the road, for this webinar. All participants have been muted; if you would like to pose a question please type your question in the Q&A tab at the bottom of your screen. I will compile the questions as we go and we will respond to as many as time will allow. Any questions we don't get, to we'll try to respond remotely. We will be doing a hard stop at 8 o'clock. Also this seminar is being recorded. Again thanks to all of you online and thanks to John and Alicia for joining us.

John and Alicia it's all yours. Well thank you very much, John. It's a great pleasure to be here with you and all of your colleagues. So, and thank you for the introduction, we have a such a long name, you wouldn't believe how many people can't get our name correct but you did a just a marvelous job. Because Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband Coalition is such a mouthful, we tend to refer ourselves by our acronym so you'll hear us refer to ourselves as the SHLB Coalition. And we're very pleased to be able to join you today, tonight to talk about the role of broadband in coping with this pandemic. We have prepared some slides which I think we'll go through in about a half an hour and then we'll be available for questions for the second half an hour. And as you said, John, our mission, if we could go to the next slide, our mission as you said is to promote broadband for anchor institutions. So we rarely are broadband advocates so we really think everyone needs a broadband connection.

Our immediate focus are the anchor institutions so the schools and health providers and libraries that are in our name, but also beyond that we support the idea of extending high quality and affordable broadband to the surrounding communities. And if we could go to the next slide you can see a little bit of our philosophy here and a little bit more detail. So yes we're concerned about we try to be a voice for the anchor institutions and broadband policy issues but the reason and the reason we were started the reason the Gates Foundation came to me to suggest putting this coalition together is that the traditional broadband providers divide the world between business and residential and they often leave out the needs of anchor institutions. So we try to be the voice in policy debates on around broadband and the reason that's so critical is the anchor institutions are kind of like the third leg of the stool for a healthy community or you could say they're the glue that holds the community together in addition to the business and residential. They need to be strong anchor institution but and by the way it's not just schools and libraries and health but also community colleges, public housing, prisons, houses of worship. Any institution that's aggregating a large numbers number of people but are dedicated to serving the public. That's who we try to represent in our policies. But as they said earlier it's

not just about the building's themselves we strongly believe in deploying broadband not just to the anchor institution but through them to reach the surrounding community.

Some people say another way to describe it is that community anchor institutions are jumping off points to the surrounding community but almost all of Americans live within the zip code of a community anchor institution. So we also think the economics make sense that's a rational business strategy to build to the anchor institutions and then extend the signal they're out to the surrounding consumers.

So with that is our philosophy I like to introduce our Communications Manager, Alicia Johnson, who's going to talk a little bit about the real world of broadband today and why it's so important for these particular public services that that called the need of high capacity broadband connections.

So Alicia Johnson is our Communications Manager and I'll turn it over to her. Thank you, John, and thank you so much Dr. Foote for having us. So as John said the COVID-19 pandemic has really shown us how important broadband is. Life as we know it is now happening online, as state the obvious, and everybody needs a broadband connection. It's not just a commodity anymore and it's been like that for a while but this really makes it even more important. So depending on our unique circumstances if we do have a broadband connection right now the way things are we are able to access government services online. We can bank we can maybe go to work depending on our situation. So we have all of these different options for how we can ride out this pandemic when we have broadband. But those who don't have broadband have to go into the public every day and do those things that we're able to do online. And that's, so now it's a matter of public safety, not just equity which is how you normally hear SHLB talk about broadband for sure. So we wanted to focus on the fact that broadband is also critical for information right now. So it's it's just a public safety matter and ubiquitous broadband access is now an urgent national priority. CIA's are being affected by this as is everybody and they are finding that their broadband connections are more important than ever.

They are also facing a lot of challenges right now. As many of you who have kids will know school is out and schools are facing a really difficult dilemma because of the fact that not everybody has broadband access. Their options are to continue instruction online and possibly leave behind those students who don't have that broadband access or they can just say normal learning for everyone. And there's been a family in Berkeley that's gotten some attention due to a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds recently. That they have twin daughters and each daughter it goes to a different school system. So one daughter is in school for seven hours a day right now and the other daughter is not. And so the schools are having to make this difficult choice, and no school should have to make that decision. And then meanwhile some schools are trying to circumvent these issues for their students and provide access to everybody but there are restrictions on their networks if they are funded by e-rate and John's going to go into that more later. So that's a huge challenge for schools is they want to find out how to get their students broadband, and also their staff, but without losing funding for their broadband networks. Schools in South Bend, Indiana have deployed about twenty buses with Wi-Fi which are parked at various sites across the city. So that's something that they're doing. And we're hearing a lot of examples like that across the country. And it's a band-aid solution but it's the type of creative thinking that's needed here . And then hospitals and health clinics are also facing an unprecedented increase in telehealth demand. So this means that they need additional broadband capacity, as well as, additional devices.

And then libraries of course pride themselves on being that place in the community where anybody can get a broadband connection and go online, so they're trying to find ways to meet their patrons where they are with a broadband connection. One system is repurposing bookmobiles as Wi-Fi hotspots and it's parking them in areas with a big lack of internet access. So those are some real-world examples of the broadbands during COVID-19.

Right thanks Alicia, so John asked us to talk about some of the deficiencies in our existing broadband networks and so I wanted to explain a little bit about how we got to this situation. We're not satisfied with the level of broadband investment and usage today and this slide begins to explain a bit about why that happened. So the SHLB Coalition was founded in 2009 and just at that time the FCC was putting together a National Broadband Plan. So that was just in our infancy and we had some influence on this first bullet so we convinced the FCC to adopt a goal of getting anchor institutions gigabit connectivity by the year 2020. That's the goal that was the goal established 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, we didn't meet that goal we made some progress but probably schools developed had the most success because of the reforms in the E-rate program, which we'll talk about in a minute, but libraries probably only around 60% of libraries have gigabit connectivity and public housing and houses of worship these other institutions are even less than libraries. But that wasn't the only goal that we didn't meet here are a few other bullets that of recommendations from the National Broadband Plan but the problem that we don't we didn't achieve, and the problem was that the National Broadband Plan was a document full of recommendations but it did not have the force of law. So they were advice being given to the FCC and to they of Congress and we've been trying to work on these issues but it hasn't really been self-fulfilling.

So, for instance as you can see here the Broadband Plan called for detailed data market by market and broadband availability pricing and competition. Well we don't have that data today. The FCC has tried to gather maps but it relied upon the industry to provide information, and the industry exaggerates their level of broadband availability so the data and the maps just are not very good. Congress just passed to try to improve those broadband Maps but that's still going to take a couple of years to implement. So we're very far behind in developing the raw data that we need to analyze the situation. The National Broadband Plan also called for Congress to allow communities to deploy their own broadband networks. Unfortunately, there are 19 states that have laws on the books to prohibit municipal broadband or port limitations on municipal broadband, so that goal was not met. The broadband plan suggested improving the rights-of-way to increase the incentives for investment and provide some equality with regard to access to the telephone poles and the conduit.

The federal government has tried to do so but largely that's a local regulatory issue and some of the existing incumbent users of those rights away who filed suit to try to block competitors from getting access to those rights away. And then the fourth bullet is almost laughable, the goal from the National Broadband Plan ten years ago was to establish a baseline that everybody should have four megabits of service. Well now the standard the minimum standard is 25 megabits and even that is not enough. So we really ought to be building for the future but we were operating over the last 10 years with the National Broadband Plan that we didn't really succeed in accomplishing all the goals, and even some of those goals were inadequate in and of themselves, as you can see from that last bullet. So that explains a little bit of why as you can see on this slide that we have a very significant digital divide still. The FCC estimates 21.3 million Americans don't have sufficient broadband. That's probably an undercount, as the bullets here say two other organizations have run their own tests and they find that the number of Americans that don't have broadband is much higher than the FCC. And that's largely because it's expensive to deploy broadband networks especially in those rural markets, and the prices are still too high. The ordinary price for a broadband connection tends to be in the neighborhood of $50 to $60 a month; the FCC subsidy for low-income consumers is only $9.25 a month. So the FCC is not providing a high enough subsidy to allow low-income people to afford to purchase a broadband connection. So unfortunately the digital divide, you know we've been talking about it for twenty years, and it still has not been solved. And that's a real disappointment to me as somebody who's been working on this for that many years, that we're still behind in achieving that goal. I know everyone should have a portable broadband.

So the next slide talks about some of the things that the FCC has done. So the FCC does have control over what's called the Universal Service Fund and this is a fund with four components to it and they're listed there in the bullets from biggest to smallest. A high-cost fund became the connect America fund recently it's been renamed again it's the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund that's about 4.5 billion dollars in funding that the FCC provides to rural areas of the United States and actually the FCC now is embarked on a pretty good process of using a reverse auction to give companies the incentive to lower their bids they bid against each other to reduce the amount of subsidy that they need to deploy service to these rural markets. And it's kind of an interesting and effective mechanism to drive you down to the lowest cost provider in a competitively neutral way so nobody has an advantage of incumbency there everybody's competing in an auction. So it's not a bad system but really the FCC should have done this a long time ago we're just now embarked on this rural digital Opportunity Fund auction that's going to start in October later to here but that's going to take a few years to play out.

The E-rate program is second that program is capped at four billion dollars per year. The FCC did some very good things here in 2014 it reformed the e-rate rules for schools and libraries to promote fiber

deployment and provided funding for Wi-Fi inside the school and library building. And what's interesting is because of those efficiencies the demand for E-rate funding has actually dropped. So the actual demand for dollars has been reduced to about 2.8 2.9 billion dollars per year even though the cap is at for their authorized to spend 4 billion dollars per year. So that's been we've made some good progress with schools and libraries other anchor institutions still need to do more. A lifeline program is as I said addressed to low-income Americans unfortunately that suffered from some fraud. Some of the companies involved filed claims for people or they actually they used third-party marketers to sell broadband connections to people who already had a broadband connection or didn't need it and there were some difficult enforcement actions being taken against some companies.

So the FCC is trying to fix that program but it's been a long struggle but we're getting closer to fixing that. But still the amount of money that we're talking about is not enough as I said earlier to fund a broadband connection. And then the fourth program Rural Health Care is the by far the smallest that program the FCC has allocated 605 million dollars per year. And the demand for that program is just shooting through the roof especially during this pandemic. So if you would look at this from the start you'd say well hey rural health care should be at least as large as the E-rate program but it's not. It's been treated as the backwater of the Universal Service Fund and now that's changing and we'll talk about that in just a minute. So we believe in the next slide that the FCC really needs to do much more to address the problems and especially during this pandemic.

So our SHLB Coalition wrote a letter to the FCC in March with a number of recommendations. I'm not going to go through every one of these but these are this was a letter to the FCC suggesting how they could use their existing authority to improve connect broadband connectivity. Here's some, and we give them a bunch of recommendations about things they could do right to try to address this need. The primary theme here as you can see from the first few bullets is if you've got a broadband connection to the school or library that's a high capacity connection but the school or library is closed well it doesn't make sense to just shut off that connection and not share it with the community. We recommended that the FCC should allow open up allow the schools and libraries to open up those connections to take advantage of that dormant capacity. And the FCC to its credit has done some of those things as you can see on the next slide of all the recommendations that we submitted the FCC did adopt like the first seven or so of our recommendations.

So we give the FCC some credit now these were the low-hanging fruit so it's understandable but the FCC did turn things around very quickly and acted on some of our recommendations which we were very pleased to see. But these are incremental steps and there's a lot more that the FCC can do. And one of those things that they can do, one of the other things that the FCC did which is on the next slide is to obtain commitments from the private sector companies not to disconnect their consumers. So we think

this is also a positive thing, at least for the 60-day period where the companies are obliged to comply. But of course it's not a long-term solution this is just to prevent a disaster and disconnecting people during this crisis. And unfortunately it looks as if this healthcare crisis may be with us for a few more months and we don't know how long that's going to be so the question is what else does the FCC and Congress need to do beyond these 60 days and really allow us to build for the future and build and get broadband deployed more quickly and universally. So on the next slide you'll see that some of the recommendations that we made to the FCC are that they should use their E-rate authority and not be so constrained by a small interpretation of the statutory language but we really think for instance the E-rate program focuses on providing funding to the classroom. Well if the classrooms are not open and the students are learning at home via distance learning the classroom is effectively now at home. So we think that the FCC should under the statute use some of their E-rate funding to fund broadband connections where students actually are, in their homes today.

And we wrote a blog about this we filed some legal briefs to support this argument not everybody agrees with us and particularly some of the Republican FCC commissioners don't feel that they have the statutory authority to use E-rate funding to subsidize broadband connections to the home. So that brings us to Congress and actually, I'm sorry we'll get to that the next slide. Also there's been a lot of activity as well for low-income consumers and we as long as well as some members of Congress have also asked the FCC did you do to do more to fund those broadband connections to the home particularly for WiFi hotspots. That's universally regarded as site of the quick quickest and easiest solution for

consumers at home to get a broadband connection and so that was all the rage for a while but now we're discovering there's a shortage of hotspots because a lot of them are manufactured and there's been such a run on them that the manufacturers have not been able to keep up with the demand so there's a shortage of hotspots. The other problem is you need a high-quality cellular signal and some of the most rural markets the hotspots don't work that well because the cellphone signal is not strong enough. So those are some of the challenges for using the existing authority to address the broadband needs. So again the FCC has done some things where the FCC could do more but really we need Congress to step up and appropriate additional funding for broadband connectivity.

Now we propose some ideas to Congress and they were briefly considered in a bill that Speaker Pelosi put together but ultimately that broadband provision funding provisions were dropped out of the Coronavirus 3 package, what we now know is the Cares Act. So they did include a small amount of funding for a telehealth program at the FCC and as you can see here some miscellaneous provisions. The $50 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services is a small amount of money we were asking for $500 million we got $50 million. That's a start and that's going to help IMLS provide some funding to community organizations to help promote digital literacy training. A lot of people need help understanding how to subscribe for a broad bit to a broadband service. But that was not nearly enough money now in the Cares Act.

So we are continuing to ask Congress to do much more than that and here are some of the proposals that we have been working on. The Digital Equity Act was introduced last year before this crisis came about. It's still relevant today and this would provide 1.2 billion dollars for digital literacy training around the country. The Healthcare Broadband Expansion Act, this is an act that really we worked on very closely with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and this was just introduced a week and a half ago. We're very, very pleased with her effort. This bill would appropriate two billion dollars to the FCC's Rural Healthcare Program. I mentioned earlier the Rural Healthcare Program is the smallest of the four. Universal Service Programs at $605 million. So this bill would appropriate $2 billion on top of the $600 million. And we think this has a very good chance of being enacted in the next Coronavirus stimulus bill. And then the most recent news which just happened today is the introduction of this E-rate Emergency Connectivity Act by Congresswoman Grace Meng from upstate New York. She would, her bill would provide 2 billion in dollars in funding for schools and libraries to provide devices and internet service for students at home. And we understand from Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts that he is also going to introduce a companion version of this bill in the Senate. So this is very positive development. So we think there's a chance that this bill could also be introduced in the next Coronavirus relief package.

And just as a footnote I saw just this afternoon Speaker Pelosi saying once they get this new bill enacted over the next couple of days to put additional funding into the Small Business Paycheck Protection Program that infrastructure spending from broadband and other infrastructures is going to be next on her list. So we hope that these bills will be included in the next legislation that Congress takes up perhaps in the in the next week or two. So we're hopeful now we're optimistic but there's a lot of work to do to convince Congress to take these steps and of course it all depends on how long we think the Coronavirus is going to stick around. Are schools going to reopen in the fall in September? We don't really know at this stage. And it could well be that a lot of students and parents, even if the school is technically reopened in September, the virus may still be with us and so the kids are still concerned about going to school. So some of them may go to school some of them may stay home. Which means that we will still need to provide some broadband support to make sure those students at home have a high quality internet connection.

So that John I'll summarizes our work as you can see from the slides we've done a lot of research, actually Alicia did a lot of research. I want to give her credit for this fabulous list of sources here that you can work through to develop more information. But we're happy to go into the question and answer period now and answer any questions there may be out there. Well John and Alicia thank you. That was a, that was terrific and it has provoked a number of questions. So I'm gonna try to agglomerate these questions and see if we can get to as many as possible. First, just to get everyone kind of on the level set a bit, can you just explain a little bit about how the Universal Service Fund is funded? And I believe that E-rate is part of that, so for those of us who may not be fully conversant in the the Arcania of the FCC explain that funding mechanism. Sure it is a complicated beast I understand the reason for the question. So the entire Universal Service Fund is about nine billion dollars per year that the FCC distributes to those four programs I mentioned and it collects the funding for this on your telephone bill. It's kind of an old-fashioned way of collecting money. But there's a surcharge on long-distance, meaning interested in international telephone calls telecommunication services, and that surcharge has been growing. That when the Telecommunications Act first passed in 1996 the fee was about four percent, the surcharge on your phone bill is about four percent, now it's about twenty one percent.

And I've been working with a coalition of parties, including public interest groups like ours and industry groups, to say that this contribution factor is the name that's been given for the surcharge on your phone bills, has been going up and up and up and it's increasingly discriminatory. Some people are paying it on their phone bills whereas but broadband services are not paying. There's no surcharge on broadband services even though the money is going to to pay for broadband connections broadband services do not fund. So it's creating an inequity and who pays into the fund and who doesn't pay into the fund. This this whole a funding mechanism really needs to be reformed and updated it hasn't changed in 30 years. So that's the current funding mechanism but we're looking as I said to replace it with something that would be more equitable. But the interesting thing, I'm sorry the last point on that, the interesting thing about the nine billion dollars that the FCC makes available is that it doesn't run through Congress. The FCC collects that funding on its own through the phone bills and Congress does not it's not part of the the budget every year so it doesn't depend and that's the beauty of it in away it doesn't depend on congressional politics.

The FCC has control over how that money is raised and how it's spent. So of all the questions that one was nine billion dollars sounds like real money, is that beings, is that not being spent to meet the needs or the problems, or is it just not enough? Well that's a really good question and there's a lot of debate about how effective that nine billion dollars is. My own view which I'll watch but I welcome anybody to take a different point of view, but the 4.5 billion for the biggest component of that, for that high-cost fund, now the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, there has not been a lot of oversight over how that money has been used. So most of that money goes to small rural telephone companies and a lot of them do a great job of serving their communities but there hasn't been a lot of accountability. And so we don't really know how much what they've done with that money we should be much farther along there should be much more broadband deployed by now given that we've been giving away that four and a half billion dollars every year for the last 20-25 years or so to the small telcos and not just in small telcos but also to AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, those companies and when they serve rural markets they also receive some of that funding.

So where has that money gone what has it been used for we don't have good accountability for it and that's been a problem. Well that tees up the next question, that you know, I think we're all in a situation now where we were concerned about what the federal government can/cannot do or will, or will not do, is there a role for state and local governments to address this problem in their local jurisdictions? Oh absolutely, we should not be relying only on the FCC to do this on a nationwide basis and to their credit, many states have been putting together their own broadband programs over the last four or five years. In fact some of the states are beginning to compete with each other over their broadband funding programs because they know broadband is so essential for economic development and economic growth. So you have states like Minnesota that has a border-to-border grant program California has the Advanced Services Fund, those are just a couple, but many states have their own broadband programs but they need to be coordinated with the FCC. And this is a delicate dance that has to be done because you don't want the states to be funding projects that either are duplicative of what the FCC might be funding or contrary to what the FCC might be funding.

So there really needs to be a coordinated federal, state, and local approach, and I tell you my own view too, is that we have not engaged with the local governments enough to understand where the broadband exists and where it doesn't exist. If you ask members of Congress they'll say well we need better mapping and I have to be honest and say I'm not sure that's worth the effort because the mapping tends to end up relying upon industry provided data where they exaggerate the extent of their broadband networks and they overstate where broadband is and isn't. It would be much more effective in my opinion to award money to local governments to do their own state-by-state, I'm sorry, community by community needs assessment.

Local governments are in a better position to know where the broadband exists in their neighborhoods, where it doesn't exist, how much it will cost to get broadband there. And so one of the first things that we're going to be recommending that Congress do, U.S. Congress, is to appropriate money to local governments so they can hire consultants to do this needs assessment on a local by local basis. And that you know refer back to my slide that's exactly the kind of thing that the

National Broadband Plan called for in 2010 was market by market data. But because we haven't done that we've been so distracted by these national maps that we haven't got the job done. So that's our recommendation is to for Congress to give money to the local governments to do it. And John, if I might add on, to that about the states, Pew Charitable Trusts just published a really great report covering some of the promising state practices that we're seeing state governments engage in for expanding broadband access. So I'm going to go ahead and share the link to that report into the chat box. Encourage everybody to check it out and then if I can put in a quick plug SHLB did a webinar all about state broadband that you can view on our website. Can you provide that link as well? I can. Okay great, well that was a good segue into the next question we had was that if the FCC is not getting it done, and the ISPs are not getting it done, is there the opportunity for municipalities, states, counties, coalitions of counties, to take matters in their own hands and get the right services in place? There absolutely is and some communities are doing that and they need to do that in order to attract the investment.

I was very persuaded by, this is just a quick anecdote, but there was a fiber company that's serving rural parts of South Dakota and he was asked at an FCC forum how do you choose which communities to invest in? And the CEOs response was we don't choose the communities they choose us. In other words the communities that get their act together and put together a business plan and identify what their needs are and come to the company with a thought-out plan of where the broadband needs and what the take rate is going to be and what the businesses need for their community, a company, a private sector company is going to be much more likely to make that investment , if the community has done its homework and figured out what it needs. So that's very crucial and we're also big supporters of the idea that these communities need to aggregate. If it's a series of just one-off town here a town there it's very difficult to convince companies to make that investment or for financial firms to make that investment. But if you have a set of communities working together on a broadband strategy that might have a fiber ring connecting all the towns and cities and one build rather than a whole lot of individual one offs; but a community build involving many counties working together, it's much more likely to be successful. Okay next question is this pandemic is shown vulnerabilities along a number of different areas, societal areas, broadband certainly being one of them, and we'll keep focused on that, but now since the spotlight is on broadband and we see the problems, you know now we're reacting to it. Once kids go back to school in the fall, hopefully, you know the pressures off, how can you, how can we build a sustained and proactive approach? How can we make broadband truly a national priority as opposed to something that we only think about when our computer doesn't work?

Well I tell you the work that the press has done to highlight the problems, we've received more press inquiries about the difficulties of our broadband connections these days than ever before. And I think part of the reason is in the past the traditional broadband providers have tended to say don't worry about it we've got it under control. If someone doesn't have broadband that's largely because they don't want it or they don't need it. They claimed that they were building to meet the demand and if the broadband wasn't there the community wasn't interested. that's what the industry had been saying. Now we're in a very different situation where schools, and everybody, students at home need that broadband just for basics. Basic education, basic health care. I was really struck by the story, but not just a story, by the decision of the Philadelphia School District which told its teachers to stop providing online lessons because some of the students don't have broadband at home. So that means that not just those 30% of students that didn't have broadband weren't getting online, none of the students were getting online teaching because, and there were some possibilities of lawsuits and you know perhaps a constitutional challenge against the school district if they were to offer online learning to some students but not others. So they had to shut it down for the entire school district. And I've heard of other school districts around the country in that same position. So that means this is not a local problem, it's not just a low-income problem, this is a national problem. And I think we've seen much more visibility to the scope of this problem. I mean heck, as Alisha referred to earlier, even The Wall Street Journal is writing articles about the lack of broadband and how harmful it is especially for rural America. And the same is true in health care.

I was amazed to find recently that about 2/3 of rural health care providers don't have an intensive care unit. So they're not equipped to handle the surge of Coronavirus patients in these rural communities. They need to rely on telemedicine in order to be able to connect to their patients in the rural healthcare facility or rural health hospital with an urban specialist so they can be diagnosed, and so they can exchange medical images and medical records. So that telehealth component is enormously important for health care providers to deal with this crisis. The bill that's going through Congress this week is going to provide another big boost to hospitals and provide them funding. But that's just to keep the hospital's afloat because they're having trouble generating the revenue. And it took me a while to understand this, but, because of their hospital's need to serve existing Coronavirus patients, they're not able to do all of that other testing and the more routine medical services that they provide that generates income for them. And so they're losing that income they need emergency funding just to stay afloat so they can deal with their population. But as I said this new Cares two bill that's being proposed today doesn't have funding for that telehealth broadband connections. So that's why we need the next level of broadband. But when people start dying in these rural areas because there's no telemedicine that's going to change the equation. I think that's going to create a lot more visibility and publicity for the need for broadband everywhere. Well I'm gonna take moderators prerogative and ask my own question as a follow-on to that, and that is, it would appear that this is one of those problems that should have a absolutely a bipartisan solution, that blue states, many of which are rural, are being impact, you know, they're the ones who don't have good broadband services, so they should be fully supportive of any effort to improve the infrastructure in those communities.

Urban areas we're seeing if they've got many cities there the same issues you just mentioned, Philadelphia. You know it doesn't make any difference, it's just like the virus doesn't care who you are, the annex, the ability not to access broadband is as an equal opportunity challenge for everybody. So is Congress going to say yeah absolutely it's just the time we should we should get on with this and make this right, or do you see other issues? Well I would hope that you're right and I think there's some movements in that direction, John, I even saw a different Wall Street Journal article which quoted two Republican senators as recognizing the need for greater broadband funding. And the two senators are Senator Roger Wicker, who is Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and Shelly Moore Caputo, the Senator from West Virginia, also another Republican, and they were both lamenting the fact that they don't have good enough broadband in their states of Mississippi and West Virginia. So I think you're beginning to see this turn around to become more of a bipartisan approach. Now I'm not going to take their statements to the presses as definitive proof that the funding is going to come but I think the tide is beginning to turn.

The E-rate program has been a bipartisan program for many years. And I think that's commonly recognized as kind of the ideal Democrat and Republicans joining together to support E-rating. The thing that's going to be necessary we estimated in a report that the SHLB Coalition put out that it would cost around 13 to 19 billion dollars in funding to connect all the remaining anchor institutions. There's another report from the Fiber Broadband Association that estimates it would take another seventy billion dollars to get fiber to the home for ninety percent of American homes. It used to be thirteen billion and seventy billion was viewed as way too expensive. But Congress now just passed a two point two trillion dollar Care's Package so the amount of money that we're talking about, that we think could get the job done, is now considered fairly reasonable or we think that it's considered fairly reasonable compared to the economic crisis and compared to the amounts that are being spent on other industries. So we think we have some good arguments for why Congress in this next bill should really take this up on a bipartisan basis. All right so someone then has followed on with that and said is the FCC on board? Are they a friend or foe in this effort? And the other stakeholder would be the traditional ISPs, big and small, where are they on this? Hmmm, well so the FCC, I wouldn't characterize them as friend or foe exactly it's not a black-and-white situation. As I mentioned in the presentation the FCC did some really good things right away and some of them we recommended; they did some other things we didn't think of recommending, so we give them some credit. But I will say the FCC has been a little bit more cautious about trying to do all that it can to solve this problem. And I think there's a tendency from some people to say you know this is a very emotional time let's not make rash hasty decisions here that might not be good for us in the long run, so there's a bit more caution coming from some of the FCC regulators.

On the other flipside of it, there are some on the Democratic side who are saying, never let a good crisis go to waste, this is our opportunity to ask for everything in the kitchen sink, and so that may not be an effective strategy either. So what we're hoping is for the FCC to recognize the need for greater funding and like they did with the E-rate Program, when they made the change to promote fiber financing that led to the deployment of new networks which cost a bit more at the front end but have ended up saving the E-rate Program money in the long run. And I think if we can convince people to come to that understanding of the value of building these networks, if you build them right, if you build high-capacity future-proof networks the last for years then those networks will pay for themselves over time. And I think there's a growing appreciation that this is not like, doesn't have to be an annual subsidy if you build, if you put the money upfront to deploy these networks. Yes it's costly at the front end in the first couple of years but you may save money over the next 20 or 30 years afterwards, but that's a wise investment strategy by the United States. Okay in the last couple minutes we've got remaining I'd be remiss in not asking you a question that hopefully will cause us to go away and be thinking about some other things.

So it sounds when Alicia and John, as you talk about this, that the solutions are pretty much know what the problems are and there are solutions out there. What are the policy, you know not the political issues but what are the policy issues, that really need to be further work done or investigated to get to solve this problem? Well you know we haven't talked much in this conversation about wireless, and that's also an important component of how to get broadband out to these rural markets. And one of the other ideas that we suggested to the FCC, which they have not acted on at least not yet, is that there is a band of frequencies called the EBS band and that stands for Educational Broadband Service ,it's at the 2.5 gigahertz range for those who are interested in the technology. But we think the FCC could do a lot to solve this rural digital divide by giving schools and educational organizations the right to get those licenses to deploy EBS service. And it's interesting this EBS Wireless frequencies travel several miles so you could deploy an EBS network pretty quickly. And in some cases, we're told that the equipment is available off the shelf, and once you get the authority to do it that you can deploy these networks in a matter of weeks. So we had one fascinating story about an Indian tribe that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, one of the most remote place on earth, and yet they were able to deploy an EBS network to connect to provide broadband internet via wireless signal to all the homes in that area and they were able to use microwave to bring it up out of the Grand Canyon out to the to the internet. They used EBS frequencies to do that and that could be a low-cost solution that could be very quick to deploy, we just need the FCC to authorize the schools and give the school as a chance.

The FCC is giving the right to the tribes to acquire these licenses and that is a good thing; the FCC made the right decision to give it to the tribes. We are asking for the FCC to give the same chance to the schools to be able to deploy these networks. We have some really good examples in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Northern Michigan University has deployed EBS. Imperial County in Southern California, not the San Diego region, but eastern part of the county, it's very rural, they're using EBS to deploy wireless internet. And that's another component of a way that the FCC could help solve this problem. Okay all right last chance on the Q&A for anyone who wants to type in anything if you have something else to pose to our experts. Give it a second here, you know fast typer's you are. All right, well Alicia and John, thank you so much. I'm delighted that you were able to give us some good news with the new bill that was announced today and we'll keep an eye on it, we'll write our Congressman. But we really appreciate all the work that you're doing and we'll keep our fingers crossed that this is a crisis that that we're not going to waste; so appreciate your time this evening. Well that's our pleasure to be with you John. We really appreciate the chance to talk about this work and you know for your students and any of the observers of this webinar please join with us.

You can check out our website at SHLB.org or follow us on Twitter at SHLB Coalition. We'd love to work with you we're looking for all the support we can get because this is a vitally important era and in time period where we can really try to solve a lot of these problems. Indeed, well good note to end on. Thank you so much and thank you for all of you out there who participated. And the next CIPA COVID-19 Policy Discussion will be coming up shortly, in the next several days so, thank you very much everyone. Thank you.